Nitin Sethi, TNN | May 25, 2011, 02.09am IST
NEW DELHI: Media, especially the electronic one, has found a special mention in Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia's views on the 12th five-year Plan. But, his feedback hasn't been all that flattering. The electronic media has been hauled up for 'disproportionately' showing widening disparities between the rich and the poor.
"The perception of concentration of wealth and widening disparities is sharpened by the tendency of the media, including especially the electronic media which now has very wide reach, to publicize success at the top end, including the conspicuous consumption with which it is often associated, while simultaneously focusing attention on the depth of poverty at the other end," Ahluwalia has written in a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). He has suggested that exaggerated media coverage can be partly blamed for worries about social disparities.
"Both extremes are understandably viewed as newsworthy, but in focusing disproportionately on them, the steady improvement in living standards of the very substantial population in the middle, and the associated rise of a growing middle class receives much less attention than it should," he has observed.
His quibble with the media: it focuses too much on the divide between the rich and the poor and less on the middle class, which Ahluwalia claims is a substantial population.
He may have been struck by the reports of rotting foodgrains and farmers' deaths coupled with news of multi-crore houses of business tycoons and the hundreds of crores swindled in the past few years — all of them have appeared in the media roughly around the same time.
Ahluwalia did talk of the 2G telecom scam elsewhere, and the effect of such scams on resources.
He had a kind word for the bulging middle class. "And yet this (the increasing middle class) not only represents an important welfare gain, but also an important social development, with potentially large positive effects in terms of expectations, values and a rising demand for better and more accountable government," he has written in the EPW piece.
"The perception of concentration of wealth and widening disparities is sharpened by the tendency of the media, including especially the electronic media which now has very wide reach, to publicize success at the top end, including the conspicuous consumption with which it is often associated, while simultaneously focusing attention on the depth of poverty at the other end," Ahluwalia has written in a paper in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). He has suggested that exaggerated media coverage can be partly blamed for worries about social disparities.
"Both extremes are understandably viewed as newsworthy, but in focusing disproportionately on them, the steady improvement in living standards of the very substantial population in the middle, and the associated rise of a growing middle class receives much less attention than it should," he has observed.
His quibble with the media: it focuses too much on the divide between the rich and the poor and less on the middle class, which Ahluwalia claims is a substantial population.
He may have been struck by the reports of rotting foodgrains and farmers' deaths coupled with news of multi-crore houses of business tycoons and the hundreds of crores swindled in the past few years — all of them have appeared in the media roughly around the same time.
Ahluwalia did talk of the 2G telecom scam elsewhere, and the effect of such scams on resources.
He had a kind word for the bulging middle class. "And yet this (the increasing middle class) not only represents an important welfare gain, but also an important social development, with potentially large positive effects in terms of expectations, values and a rising demand for better and more accountable government," he has written in the EPW piece.
